During Free Reading that week, Jessy read her magic book, about how forms of magic were practiced in civilizations since the beginning of time. There was divination (the palms and the runes), there was healing magic, and there was Black Magic. The book capitalized it that way: Black Magic, for when you wanted to do some harm. It had color photos of voodoo rag dolls, with stick pins poking out of their cloth heads, and woodcut-style drawings of old women on broomsticks. Jessy immediately started thinking about some new fluorescent drawings: a cauldron, flames spilling up from underneath it, with a ladle sticking out, and maybe a dangling frog. Not that it would look like a frog.
“Double, Double, Toil and Trouble,” the headline read, which made it sound like Black Magic was something you really had to work hard at. Like geometry.
Of course she’d heard of Black Magic before, everybody had, but the section on Ceremonial Magic was new to her. It talked about using symbolism, so that one thing would represent another, like a pumpkin could represent Halloween. Or like when MAD magazine used the dollar sign, and the other weird marks from the typewriter, for the swear words.
Then there was another big section with charts of “correspondences,” sets of things standing for each other. The book said you could take small fabric bags and fill them with objects, matching the color of the bag to what you put in it, so they all represented the same thing. And there was a whole sidebar about “seals.” Those were illustrations of circles, and in each circle there were different shapes, and each one was supposed to mean something.
So for love, you’d use the color red for the bag, and the number would be two, and you’d put in a rose head, and then there was a specific seal with squiggles that stood for love. Then you could use the whole bag as a kind of talisman.
Jessy was surprised at how practical this all seemed. It wasn’t like waving your hands in the air and thinking “poof,” I can make whatever I want to happen. You could follow the charts and then, who knows? Maybe it would work. She just had to decide what she wanted.
The color she was drawn to, looking at the picture of richly colored bags in a silky-looking jumble, was purple. Purple stood for wisdom. Its number was seven. Its flower was the lily. And the seal was the Seal of Solomon. From Sunday School, she knew all about the pretending to cut the baby in half, but there was also the Song of Songs, which she read in the pew on several Sundays, waiting for church to start. Even the Bible had good parts.
She could make a paper seal easily enough. They'd made coins out of yellow construction paper before, and that was close enough. And then what would she do with the bag? The book said you could keep it, or that sometimes people threw them into running water, or buried them. It seemed obvious to her that Halloween would be the best possible time to do some magic, so she could always bury it on Halloween.
She couldn't wait to tell Karma.
Even while she was thinking about it, she didn’t know if she really believed in magic, any more than if she really believed in ghosts. Deep down, she believed that she was as capable of understanding things as she would ever be, but she didn’t have a lot of information.
If she actually saw a ghost, then she’d pretty much have to believe in them. Just like with UFOs. She thought it would be really cool to see a UFO, but she didn’t believe Troy’s brother had seen one. Twyla had told her too many stories about him. Twyla thought most of the football players were idiots, and she had facts to back her up. Even so, there was Project Blue Book, after all, and people kept writing books about mysterious things they had seen. So you just never knew.
That was an idea for a story, popped right into her mind! She turned to the pages in the back of her notebook, and jotted down, “Think they see a UFO. Really a ghost.” Or maybe it went the other way, where they thought they saw a ghost, but it was really a UFO. But that would be science fiction, and that seemed a lot more difficult.
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 10
